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GOP Delivers Speech Regarding Findings of the Benghazi Committee

Aired June 28, 2016 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:30:09] REP. MARTHA ROBY, (R) ALABAMA: At the end of the day, no military assets were ever moving towards Benghazi. The bottom line is that Washington failed to have our guys' backs when they needed it. And from my perspective, this represents incompetence or indifference or both. As we know now, but for the bravery of a few Americans and the unexpected response of Gadhafi's underground militia -- Gadhafi's underground militia -- there would have been an even greater loss of life that night.

In this case, I believe that the government failed its people and lied to the public in the aftermath. This is unacceptable. And I hope -- and I know that this report shines light on that and God willing, will prevent this from ever happening again.

REP. SUSAN W. BROOKS, (R) INDIANA: I too want to join Martha in thanking our chairman. This has been an incredible task to undertake and we have worked day in and day out, particularly the staff, to come up with the truth, to bring facts to the American people that we did not know before.

I've been particularly focused on issues prior to the attack. And the things that we learned about Benghazi -- there were many new things we learned about Benghazi, things -- and we've all admitted and it's been known for sometime that the security was inadequate. But what we didn't know until this investigation was that the State Department made a conscious decision to keep the Benghazi compound off the radar and not provide it the security that it needed.

In fact, none of the facilities in Libya met any of the security requirements required by the State Department and required by law. And so when Chris Stevens was sent into Benghazi, he was initially going in with the military, but because of the president's policy of no boots on the ground, at the last minute, that military support was pulled. So we know he didn't have and the mission didn't have enough security, whether it was people or whether it was physical security tools.

But he had a mission, and he had a mission to ensure that Benghazi became a permanent post at some point because it was the individuals in Benghazi that had helped lead the mission to topple Gadhafi. And so the administration and the Clinton administration and secretary of state, they wanted to show Benghazi how important they were. They wanted to show Benghazi that they would be there for them; the Americans would not leave.

And we learned during this investigation that it was in October of 2012 that the secretary had a planned trip to Benghazi. She had planned a trip to Libya in order to show the Libyans that the Americans had been there for them and that the Americans, under her leadership, had led the charge. Well, I will tell you this was failed American foreign policy.

It was failed American foreign policy from the beginning, and that is because we learned and as the president has even said, the worst thing that we did was not planning for the day after. He has indicated the worst mistake of his presidency was not planning for the day after Gadhafi fell. And so we sent people, American diplomats, to Benghazi, to Libya, to a failed state, and what they were most concerned about at the beginning of going into Libya was making sure that it wasn't a failed state, that it wasn't a terrorist safe haven.

And what is it today? It's a terrorist safe haven. ISIS, Al Qaida, other militias are there controlling their own natural resources of oil and other place in Libya. It is failed policy. We failed these American people.

But I want to close by making sure people realize we said that we were going to try to make sure this didn't happen in the future. So not only did this committee work hard to uncover the facts and to uncover the truth and to put light on the truth, but we have pages of recommendations. Many pages of recommendations. And I would encourage you to please look at the recommendations.

And just a couple of the recommendations that are so critical is that our government agencies and the leaders of those government agencies had not planned for an attack like this.

[10:35:00] CIA,Defense Department, State Department had not been prepared and had really no plans in place to execute something like this that could happen on, of all days, September 11th. Even though the president had called a of top government officials asking if we were ready for September 11th, and while leaders said we were ready, we were not ready. We were not prepared to respond.

We also learned that political operatives got involved in messaging after this incident occurred. That should not be happening. Internal and public government communications about terrorist attacks should not be taking place. Government should be telling the American people the truth, not trying to put political spin. And so we have many recommendations that we hope, and that we will encourage our members of Congress, as well as our administrations to look at, to change their policies, to change our laws, to find more funding mechanisms, to make sure that our people are protected in the future. And with that, I yield back to the chairman.

REP. TREY GOWDY, (R) SOUTH CAROLINA: If you have questions, please identify yourself, the entity for whom you work and the member to whom the question is directed. Yes ma'am.

QUESTION: For you Mr. Chairman -- the democrats on your committee say that you put out a lot of new details, but that they don't really change the fundamental understanding of what happened and a lot of the broad themes that you've just discussed have been known for years. So at the end of the day, was this the best use of tax payer dollars and of your time?

GOWDY: It is difficult for me to begin with where I disagree with the foundation of your question so let me just start at the end of it. Who says that stuff was new? Nobody's ever reported that nothing was headed to Benghazi, nobody's ever reported that not a single wheel was turning towards Libya, God knows nobody's ever reported who actually evacuated our folks. You may have reported that Secretary Clinton was headed back to Libya in October, but you didn't have the corroboration of the e-mails and you didn't know why she was going back.

You didn't know about the $20 million memo, you didn't -- first of all you didn't know about any of the e-mails from Ambassador Stevens, you didn't know about any of the e-mails from Sidney Blumenthal to whomever he was e-mailing, you didn't know that a single U.S. military asset did not meet a single designated timeline. Think about that for a second. The world's most powerful military did not meet a single, solitary self-imposed timeline. So all of that is new.

As for the Democrats' color-me-shocked that they are critical of our report, all five of them voted not to form the committee. They threatened not to participate, and for the most part they did not. They have been serial leakers of information and they missed a really good opportunity. I don't know if you've had a chance to read the report or not, but if you read the report, you will see their report mentions her name far more times than our report does. Our report doesn't mention the presumptive Republican nominee for president, because he's got nothing to do with Benghazi.

So you can direct those questions to Elijah and the rest of them, I'm actually proud of what we found and I think it's new.

QUESTION: Are you saying that the military could have saved those four people if they had done more?

GOWDY: Well, clearly you couldn't have two of them -- they were dead within about 15 minutes of the fire being started. With respect to Glen Doherty and Ty Woods, there were three assets that made it there. The group from Tripoli that deployed itself, an unarmed drone that was elsewhere and positioned over the facility, and then another unarmed drone that the -- let's just say the evidence is split on whether or not it could have been armed. In time, it got there before the mortar attack.

So I don't know. I'm not going to make a reckless allegation that Ty Woods and Glen Doherty's lives could have been saved. What I am going to tell you is if the mortar had happened at 7:15, or 9:15, or 11:15 the result would have been the same. Nothing was ever coming to Benghazi so I think that's a fundamentally important question to ask is -- there's an e-mail that sticks out of my mind right now. It's a take-out from the SVTS from the White House meeting. Which, by the way, if you know about it, nobody reported on it. So to the Democrats' claim that there's no new information, I haven't heard much about this White House meeting until our report was issued.

One of the takeouts from that to our White House meeting, in addition to the five action items on the video -- consider this. The video had been out for a while; it wasn't new.

[10:40:00] Cairo had happened, right? Cairo happened before Benghazi.

So if you were concerned about this video, you have done absolutely nothing after you received notice that the video was going to be disseminated. You have done absolutely nothing after Cairo happened. Okay? You with me?

Cairo has happened and you have changed not one iota of your military posture. But yet, but yet when the attack in Benghazi happens, which is unconnected with the video, 50 percent of your action items coming out of a SVTS relate to the video.

QUESTION: Chairman Gowdy...

QUESTION: Chairman...

GOWDY: Yeah. Hang on a second, Luke. Yes, Chad.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) days before the election -- when we've talked to members of the committee and read through the report here, (inaudible) there are different lanes that deal with Secretary Clinton, the defense, so on and so forth.

There are folks who might read this report and say this is just a part (ph) to go get Hillary Clinton 130 days before the election, 27 days before the convention. How do you -- regardless of what's in the report -- that's going to be the criticism (ph) -- how do you deflect that when people say (inaudible)? Some of you said, well, this has demonstrated, you know, incompetence at the highest level. How do you not get that perceived as something...

GOWDY: Read it for yourself, Chad. Read the report for yourself. If you can read this report and you believe on the last page of the report that it is about one person instead of about four people, then there's nothing I can say that's going to disabuse you of that. That's just what you believe. And there's no amount of facts and no amount of evidence that is going to dissuade you from your previously held conviction. Nancy asked about the Democrats. The Democrats' mantra all along has been that there was no new information. Well there is undisputedly no -- new information. So now their position is -- but it doesn't fundamentally change the way we view Benghazi.

Yeah, if who -- evacuated your folks (ph) does not fundamentally change the way you view Benghazi. If the fact that no asset was ever headed towards the place that actually had a crisis, this e-mail that we need to -- we need to plan in case a crisis emerges, this is what came out of the SVTS.

We need to have a plan in case the crisis expands and a real threat emerges. What the hell was going on in Benghazi? Was that not a real crisis? Was that not a real threat that emerged? So I can't do anything to disabuse what Elijah thinks. He is not my audience. My audience are reasonable, fair-minded Americans who want to know what happened to four of their fellow citizens and I think they...

(CROSSTALK)

QUESTION: Chairman Gowdy, on that point -- Chairman Gowdy, you just said Representative Pompeo quoting Hillary Clinton, "what difference does it make?", saying that you can't be a leader if you don't know what's going on the ground and then saying that she was morally reprehensible for the leadership that she employed that even. How is that...

GOWDY: I'm going to let him address that. I don't think you'll see any of that in the report. Is it in the report?

QUESTION: But he's -- he's promoting it right now.

GOWDY: And you know what? You are going to write a story about your take away from the report. I stand on our report, how my fellow citizens, including my committee members, read the report. How you read the report, what story you do on the report, the report -- you read the report, you will not see any of those quotes in the report.

(CROSSTALK)

QUESTION: Can Mr. Pompeo address that? Is -- is Hillary Clinton's leadership morally reprehensible?

REP. MIKE POMPEO, (R) KANSAS : Yes.

QUESTION: It is?

POMPEO: Absolutely. But let me be clear about what we're doing and what we did. I remember the day -- none of us volunteered for this assignment, I can assure you. We were all asked to undertake this mission and the mission was very clear. We said in a room. I remember it like it was yesterday. And we all looked at each other in the eye and we said this day, the day we're standing here today, will come and what we want to be able to tell each other is that we worked our -- our tails off. I got the polite word out. We worked our tails off to develop every fact we could, to tell the American people everything we could possibly glean and we have been obstructed every step along the way in that effort, including by the very Democrats today who are calling us political. Go read these transcripts. Go look who called the witness. Go look who asked the question.

This is not the first congressional inquiry in the history of America. I dare you to go find another congressional inquiry where one party behaved in a way that was so deeply obstructive of getting the American people the facts that they needed. With respect to my statements about Secretary Clinton, I believe them in my heart. The reason Representative Jordan and I chose to write a separate report is that we felt that we had delivered an important work in the committee's tally of the information that was available.

We also are asking every one of you to go develop your conclusions about what took place. I've been knee-deep in this for over two years. So has Representative Jordan on previous committees, as well. And we feel like it is incredibly important to highlight the conclusions that Representative Jordan and I draw about the facts. Read the facts, read the reports. I think you will see that the conclusions that we draw are real and accurate and fair.

QUESTION: Mr. Gowdy, could I just get to the flip side of that -- the flip side of that could be that -- because you chose not to draw conclusions.

[10:45:04] Does that suggest that you don't have goods on placing any blame on the administration, specifically the woman who wants to be the president of the United States?

GOWDY: Dana (ph), shockingly, that was not what the House asked me to do. Look at the resolution. The resolution doesn't mention Secretary Clinton. Speaker Boehner nor Speaker Ryan have ever asked me to do anything about 2016 presidential politics.

Speaker Boehner asked me to find out what happened to four of our fellow citizens and I believe that that is what I have done.

You are welcome to read the report. I hope you will. I know you will. If you, at the end of reading that report, can conclude that it is about one person instead of about four people, I will be shocked.

QUESTION: I'm asking the opposite question. Do you believe after doing this for two years, spending of your time and millions of dollars, do you believe that based on this, that the American people should look at this and see that the woman who wants to be president has culpability (ph)?

GOWDY: I was with you until the last clause of your statement. I think the American people ought to look at it. They ought to look at it because fellow Americans died and fellow Americans were injured and fellow Americans went to heroic lengths to save other Americans. What conclusions they draw after reading it is up to them.

QUESTION: Do you disagree with Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Gordon? Because they do (inaudible).

GOWDY: I wrote the report that I think is centered in the facts. I have a background of who, what, when, where. I don't have a background in the why. You all may have a background in the why; I don't.

QUESTION: So...

GOWDY: My job is to report facts. That's what I've done. You can draw whatever conclusions you want to draw.

QUESTION: Mr. Chairman, what about the...

QUESTION: (inaudible) come over to the side (ph). Who was tapping the brakes on the military response? And my second question is what did you learn about a cover weapons operation in Benghazi?

GOWDY: Well, Katherine, we asked questions about a covert weapons operation. We made some progress. The lawyers intervened when we were beginning to make a lot of progress. And among the questions I asked the president included that one specifically.

I have not heard back from him yet. I have heard from his lawyer and I'm not holding my breath that I'm going to get an answer to that. I think it was important because the House asked us to examine policies that could have led to the attack. So I think it's important to ask the question, but that's not the focus of our -- of our committee.

QUESTION: And who was tapping the brakes on the military (inaudible)?

GOWDY: Well, tapping the brakes is a pejorative (ph) phrase and I remember when we -- when we said we were going to interview Carter Ham again. I remember a lot of raised eyebrows. Why are you going to talk to him again? As if all the right questions had been asked the first time.

I think the military leaders would tell you exactly what I said in my opening. They believed that an evacuation was imminent. When you question them on why they believed an evacuation was imminent, the answers do not withstand even the mildest level of scrutiny. You have real live witnesses that can tell you what is going on. If you think the fighting has subsided, why don't you talk to the real live witnesses that are being shot at?

If you really believe an evacuation is imminent, at some level, you are going to have to ask, how was that evacuation going to be effectuated? Because you don't have the proper vehicles to take them from the annex to the Benghazi airport and the only plane you have is one that you privately commissioned. It's not even a U.S. aircraft and you have no idea whether it's going to hold everybody. So how are you going to evacuate in the midst of a firefight?

General Ham did not even know our guys were ambushed from the compound to the annex. He didn't even know about it. So to everyone who wanted to know why we wanted to talk to General Ham again, I thought it'd be nice for General Ham to have access to all the facts because he did not have them the night he made the decisions.

QUESTION: Mr. Chairman, so some have described this as a perfect storm of bureaucratic inertia. Obviously, your report alleges blame on many levels. But I'm curious, is there one entity or one person to whom you lay most of the blame after all this analysis?

GOWDY: That's going to be in the eyes of the fellow citizens. I'm not in the business of apportioning culpability. I think that there is enough to go around, just like there's enough urgency and ingenuity and valor. That really is my take away.

And maybe it's because I have talked to the families of the four -- some of the families of the four in the last couple of days. But when you do what I used to do for a living, you ask the family -- what is it that you would like to see done? And I am at peace that we did exactly for the families what we said we would do. It just took longer, but we did what we said we would do.

[10:50:00] I wanted to be able to tell the Ty Woods' widow the truth about the military response. I wanted to be able to tell Sean Smith's mother the truth about the security leading up to it. And I am at peace that we have more information than the other committees had and we could have had more had we had just a tiny bit of cooperation from the other side.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)

GOWDY: Yes.

QUESTION: Mr. Chairman, along those lines and way (ph), the public side (ph) of the attack itself and what happened that particular night -- have you been able to, in some way, some abstract way I guess, get into a (inaudible) in his mind, regarding the U.S. presence in Libya -- how we wanted that consulate and the facilities there in Benghazi. How much he wanted the American presence to not appear militarized.

GOWDY: Well, let's be very clear about something. Chris Stevens loved the people of Libya. And in particular, he loved the people of Benghazi. And the heroism he showed going in as the envoy and what he had to deal with as the envoy, well before he was ever the ambassador, is a literal (ph) valor and heroism and commitment to his country that if you don't read the report for any other reason, read it to see what Chris Stevens had to endure in 2011.

Now you ask me did we have an insight to his mindset? Yes, he got there on September 10. He started meeting with intelligence officials about the state of security in Libya and he began to postpone his subsequent meetings because what he was hearing. He knew it wasn't great, he had no idea how bad it was. So he began to postpone the next meeting is ready, the next meeting is ready and here's our ambassador saying I'm not through getting my de-briefing yet. And then he moves the off-campus meetings and engagement to on- campus. And then you see his diary entry -- you see his diary entry on September the 11th?

Read his diary entry, read the e-mail that he sent to the British diplomat. No, we didn't know exactly what was on Chris Steven's mind, Benghazi had deteriorated in a way that he did not even expect and security was what was on his mind.

QUESTION: But he wanted the appearance that the United States president there was not solidified by... GOWDY: I think he wanted to stay alive more than anything else. With all due respect, I think he wanted to stay alive. And if that means a slightly higher footprint then there need to be experts or supervisors in your life that say we appreciate your valor, but we're going to give you the security that you asked for originally.

QUESTION: Mr. Chairman?

GOWDY: Yes.

QUESTION: So people have kind of asked a version of this question in different ways, but America...

GOWDY: (inaudible) like my answer.

QUESTION: Americans who viewed these events and all of these investigations through certain lenses -- and they're probably going to continue after today despite your pleas that they read 800 pages of a report. There are bumper stickers and T-shirts all over this country that say Hillary Clinton lied, people died. Maybe Mr. Pompeo (ph) would answer this too. Is that true?

GOWDY: You don't see that T-shirt on me and you've never seen that bumper sticker on any of my vehicles and you've never heard me comment on that.

(CROSSTALK)

QUESTION: Shed any light on that, invested (ph)?

GOWDY: Have you read it?

QUESTION: Well I'm asking you, I haven't had time.

GOWDY: Well I'm asking you to read it. I'm asking you to read it. I'm not going to tell you what to be on the look out for, I'm going to tell you there's new information and it fundamentally changes the way I view what happened before, during and after. But I -- who was it Ben Rhodes that said reporters literally know nothing? Was that right, was that Ben Rhodes said? I don't believe that, I actually trust you to read the report for yourself and draw your own conclusions. You're going to write your report.

QUESTION: But you're the expert so what do you think? Do you think she lies?

GOWDY: I'm not going to assign -- that's a word you couldn't use in a courtroom.

I know this: I want you to contrast the information and the evidence that was available on the evening of September 11. Look at the full body of evidence that was available and then look at what was said. And then you draw your own conclusion on whether or not you made the best views of the evidence and the information that was available. It is one thing to say the evidence didn't exist. It existed, we found them. We found the D.S. agents, we found the GRS agents -- their conversation is ongoing throughout the night. She actually talked to Greg Hicks (ph), so that argument actually works both ways. If there's a layer of information, she was fairly definitive in certain statements she made to other people privately. There was no ambiguity.

[10:55:02] It wasn't like, you know, "I can't answer that question, Mr. Egyptian political leader. We don't know." She was pretty definitive. It was just in the public statements to us that it was less definitiveness.

So you're going to have to decide that for yourself.

REP. JIM JORDAN, (R) OHIO: I'll just pick up right where the chairman was. Look at the statements made privately. You decide for yourself. What she said privately, what others said, the administration said privately, what they said publicly. You know, some of them said well, the intelligence analysis changed over time. That's true, but their statement didn't. They were consistent publicly that the video inspired protests, privately, terrorist attack. That continued.

So look for yourself. You can decide. But when you look at the private statements compared to what they told the American people, a stark contrast, a dramatic difference. Look for yourself.

REP. LYNN WESTMORELAND, (R) GEORGIA: Let me just say we have -- this report has never been about one person. It's been about the four Americans and what the other Americans inside Libya did to save their colleagues. The media has made this -- wants to make this about one person. The Democrats want to make this about one person. That's never been our intention.

But we have enough facts in the report that I think every American can make their own mind up. If you talk to Ty Woods' dad, he's -- he's going to have a different opinion from reading the report of what the secretary told him and what the facts say in the report. Sean Smith's mother is probably going to have that same different way of looking at the report.

So I think each American needs to read this report. It's lengthy, but it had to be lengthy so we could spell out what the truth is and what these new facts have given light to. But this report -- and I promise you, the chairman has made this very clear to each and every one of us -- this was not about one single person. In fact, the report, I think, we reached our goal when we came up with the different recommendations that need to be done to prevent this from happening again.

And I think the detail that we went into makes these recommendations all the more important. And hopefully, the speaker and other people will take them and do something with them because I do think they lay out a means of us not getting in this same situation.

I would like to comment too that when these Americans arrived from Tripoli to the airport in Benghazi, they were there for about three hours. And so I don't think we knew if we had another hostage situation at the airport or not. But as it's been said by the other members, not one wheel had been up, not one person headed to Benghazi, and we didn't really know how those guys -- if they were going to even be allowed to leave the airport.

So there were many other situations that should have been talked about at different times in Washington that were never talked about. Do we have another hostage situation? Is the ambassador a hostage? Are these military guys and other GRS, are they being held hostage? We didn't see any evidence of that ever being talked about while these guys are standing there, trying to talk their way off that airport to get -- to help their friends.

GOWDY (?): Last question.

QUESTION: Mr. Chairman...

GOWDY: Well, I haven't -- I haven't gotten a question yet, although the last one may be, about the latter part of -- of what I call section two, which is the post-attack communication.

I want to pivot for just a second away from the person you're asking me about to the person the administration put on the five Sunday talk shows. We talked to her and I appreciate Mr. Eggleson (ph) making her available. I found that interview to be very informative.

GOWDY: She was the third choice. I thought she was inadequately prepared and that's what happens when you are inadequately prepared. You say a series of demonstrably false things on national television, including about the FBI, including conflating the video with the demonstration, including saying that a handful of extremists hijacked and otherwise this is just stuff that's made up.

It'd be one thing if it were in the talking points. There are multiple sets of talking points. HIPC (ph) talking points.